Robert Ferguson was one of the most incendiary of the old- school blues shouters, and his explosive stage show and booming voice earned him the nickname “H-Bomb”.

An outrageous showman, he made his first recordings in 1950s, before the rock’n’roll era, and was still performing right up to his death, dressed absurdly in a series of multicoloured wigs and with a pet snake coiled around his neck. Yet he was far more than a novelty act and, during the 1950s, made some thrilling records which encompassed blues, R&B and rock’n’roll.

He was born in 1929 in Charleston, South Carolina, the eleventh of 12 children. His father was a strict Baptist minister who encouraged him to have piano lessons so that he could play in church.

Many years later he recalled that occasionally when a “blue note” came out in his playing, his father would warn him that God would strike him down if he fell for “the devil’s music”. Despite such admonishments, the lure of the blues was strong, and he would sneak over to a friend’s house to practise in the boogie-woogie style that he had heard the likes of Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis playing on the radio.

By the mid-1940s he was playing and singing in nightclubs and in 1949 he was invited to join Cat Anderson’s blues orchestra. The way he told the story, he packed a few clothes in a paper bag and climbed out of his bedroom window, taking to the road without bidding his family goodbye.

After a short stint with Joe Liggins & His Honeydrippers and some time in Atlanta, he headed north to New York, where he cut his first records in 1950 in a vocal style modelled on Wynonie Harris, whose jump blues hits Bloodshot Eyes and Good Rocking Tonight were early precursors of the rock’n’roll style that was about to emerge. Harris and Ferguson often met at battle-of-the-blues contests in which two or more blues shouters would pit their skills against each other, and the older man came to refer to Ferguson as his adopted son.

By 1951 he had earned the nickname “H-Bomb”, and by cutting the single Rock H-Bomb Rock for the Atlas label, he ensured that the name would stick.

Touring the so-called “chitlin’ circuit” of black clubs the following year, he struck up a friendship with another act on the bill, a young guitarist named B. B. King. “We had one room, one bed. He slept in one end and I slept in the other,” Ferguson later recalled.

Throughout the 1950s he recorded for a variety of labels including Prestige Savoy and Speciality, singing mostly in the jump blues style.

Among his best-known songs from the period were Bookie Blues, Tortured Love, Hot Kisses, Slowly Goin’ Crazy, Good Lovin’ — which gave him his first gold record — and Hole in the Wall Tonight, which he recorded for Decca in 1954 with a 17-piece orchestra.

He was also a popular host and performer at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, the legendary home of black music in New York, but in 1957 he left for Cincinnati, the city that would remain his home for the rest of his life. There he formed the Mad Lads with guitarist Big Ed Thompson, and his piano playing was heard on record for the first time on a series of singles for local labels such as Big Bang, Arc and King/Federal. Influenced by the abandoned vocal style of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who had recently had a hit with the feral I Put a Spell on You, he cut some of the best records of his career, including Midnight Ramblin’ Tonight in 1959, on which he sounded completely out of control.

That he did not record again for another 25 years was partly due to changing musical tastes. It was also because he chose to walk away from the recording industry, in disgust at what he regarded as daylight robbery over unpaid royalties.

Throughout the 1960s he concentrated on live work and touring but in the 1970s he abandoned that, too, and drove a garbage truck for five years.

By the 1980s he was back with a stage show that was more outlandish than ever, becoming a well-known fixture on the Cincinnati club scene and at blues festivals with his outrageous stage costumes, fluorescent wigs and sharing the stage with a pet snake named Boo-Boo.

In 1992 he finally released his first CD, Wiggin’ Out, and promoted it with an acclaimed appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival. He continued to perform regularly and in October this year made a typically incendiary appearance at the Cincinnati premiere of a documentary film about his career, The Life & Times of H-Bomb Ferguson.

Big City Blues, a compilation of his recordings made for various labels between 1951-54 was released in the US in the week of his death, from emphysema and cardiopulmonary disease.

His is survived by his wife and their son, and by three children from a previous marriage.

H-Bomb Ferguson, blues musician, was born on May 9, 1929. He died on November 26, 2006, aged 77